A towering wall of dust rolled through metro Phoenix on Monday with storms that left tens of thousands of people without power and temporarily grounded flights at the city airport.
Some flights were diverted to Las Vegas. Things are back to normal on Tuesday morning, though a few flights are still delayed.
There were some areas of the airport where leaking occurred due to the rain and high winds with gusts reaching upwards of 70 miles per hour. Contractors worked through the night to make repairs to sections of roof that were impacted by the storm.
About 39,000 people were without power Monday night in Arizona, most of whom were in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, according to PowerOutage.us.
Motorists hurried home through strong winds and rain as the dust storm, commonly referred to as a haboob, approached. Haboobs are associated with collapsing thunderstorms and strong winds and can make driving on roads nearly impossible.
The haboob cut visibility to a quarter-mile across metro Phoenix but had cleared up by Monday evening. Phoenix has been drier than usual during the summer rainy season, while parts of southeast and north-central Arizona have had a fair amount of rain, said Mark O’Malley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Phoenix.
“But that’s typical for a monsoon, very hit and miss,” he said.
The forecast for metro Phoenix calls for a 40% chance of rain Tuesday before drying out, O’Malley said.
The Arizona Department of Transportation wrote in a post on the social platform X that people should not drive into a dust storm, "But if you’re on the road when one hits, PULL ASIDE, STAY ALIVE!”
Planes at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport were temporarily grounded due to “extreme weather,” Heather Shelbrack, the airport's deputy aviation director for public relations, said in an email. By Monday evening, the ground stop had been lifted, with flights delayed about 15 to 30 minutes.
Traffic lights were also out in neighboring Gilbert, and the storm toppled trees across town, according to the city's police department.
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Meteorologist say this is a seasonal weather pattern and isn’t predicted to break any high-temperature records. -
From Flagstaff, Darren McCollum with the National Weather Service said the start of meteorological winter comes with a short term period of dry and cooler weather. -
A team of researchers has been studying meteorological and air quality data collected during the 189 dust storms we’ve experienced in Phoenix since 2010. Based on that analysis, they recently unveiled the "Phoenix Dust Scale," a ranking system to assess the severity of dust storms. -
A team of 22 meteorologists and weather experts spent years developing the first standardized dust storm scale. It's designed to classify severity, like the Enhanced Fujita scale that's used for categorizing tornadoes. -
The city of Flagstaff is having one of the wettest starts to the water year on record, according to the National Weather service. A water year is a yearlong measurement of surface-water supply.
